A window to the past

A few days ago I was participating in that time-old Atlanta tradition of sitting in traffic, watching giant gas-sucking SUV's swerve around me driven by self-absorbed scumbags chatting on their cell phones in their desperate effort to get home to their suburban ranches before sundown.

Atlanta dies everyday at 5pm. Skyscrapers empty like beads in a rain stick, shiny new cars and trucks rev onto the highway, and an eerie silence creeps onto the streets and sidewalks. Within a couple of hours, downtown Atlanta becomes a concrete ghost town.

I was reminded of Atlanta's urban flight last night at Thanksgiving dinner, hanging out at my father-in-law's house in Cumming (an hour north of Atlanta). On his coffee table was "The History of Atlanta" -- a large book filled with old, sepia-tone photographs of downtown Atlanta placed alongside new ones shot from the same perspective for easy comparison.

In nearly every case, the old photographs, originally shot a century ago, contained large groups of men, women, and children walking around, sitting on park benches, and filling their bags with groceries to take home. The streets were filled with Model-T's, horses, and bicycles. The energy on street was magnetic, alluring, and vibrant. Utterly absorbed in the photographs, I could almost hear the sounds of antique cash registers, the clip-clop of horses, and the polite greetings of neighbors passing one another on the sidewalks.

With one glance to the opposite page containing the matching "new" photo, shot from the same angle a century later, the sounds fell silent. The people, shops, and cars were gone. Gleaming signs with rich typography were torn down in favor of lifeless forest green and red awnings. Park benches filled with citizens taking a brief rest were now either empty, or filled (ironically) with homeless men and women slumped over on the hand wrests.

Amazingly, the book's forward and captions were written to convey far we've come in the past hundred years. Look at how modern, large, and powerful we are. No more dusty roads or noisy signs. We have gleaming skyscrapers, miles of blacktop, and a Starbucks on every corner.

The social erosion so eerily conveyed by the book is rooted in the city government's short-sighted decisions and a total lack of urban planning. Atlanta has become a sprawling, strip-mall and parking garage-laden mess. Houses and buildings of civic pride and historical importance, one of which called a "hunk of junk" by Mayor Andrew Young, have been erased. The result, as many found out during the ‘96 Summer Olympics, is a city with a hole in its soul with nothing standing to physically convey our civic personality or spirit.

The urban planning is so out of whack, we now have the distinction of being a guinea pig for students of the Harvard Design School. Perhaps they can get us out of this mess.

Comments

Posted by: pr at November 28, 2001 10:42 AM